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are delivered. Most come so stealthily – without even the hint of a
raised eyebrow or upturned smile – you almost have to wonder if Stallman’s
laughing at his audience more than the audience is laughing at
him.
Watching members of the Maui High Performance Computer Center
laugh at the St. IGNUcius parody, such concerns evaporate. While
not exactly a standup act, Stallman certainly possesses the chops to
keep a roomful of engineers in stitches. “To be a saint in the Church
of Emacs does not require celibacy, but it does require making a commitment
to living a life of moral purity,” he tells the Maui audience.
“You must exorcise the evil proprietary operating systems from all
your computers, and then install a wholly [holy] free operating system.
And then you must install only free software on top of that. If
you make this commitment and live by it, then you too will be a saint
in the Church of Emacs, and you too may have a halo.”
The St. IGNUcius skit ends with a brief inside joke. On most Unix
systems and Unix-related offshoots, the primary competitor program
to Emacs is vi, pronounced vee-eye, a text-editing program developed
by former UC Berkeley student and current Sun Microsystems chief
scientist, Bill Joy. Before doffing his “halo,” Stallman pokes fun at the
rival program. “People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church
of Emacs to use vi,” he says. “Using a free version of vi is not a sin;
it is a penance. So happy hacking.” 9
After a brief question-and-answer session, audience members gather
around Stallman. A few ask for autographs. “I’ll sign this,” says Stallman,
holding up one woman’s print out of the GNU General Public
License, “but only if you promise me to use the term GNU/Linux
instead of Linux” (when referring to the system), “and tell all your
friends to do likewise.”
The comment merely confirms a private observation. Unlike other
stage performers and political figures, Stallman has no “off” mode.
Aside from the St. IGNUcius character, the ideologue you see onstage
is the ideologue you meet backstage. Later that evening, during a
dinner conversation in which a programmer mentions his affinity for
“open source” programs, Stallman, between bites, upbraids his tablemate:
“You mean free software. That’s the proper way to refer to
it.”